FREE NEWSLETTER: Econintersect sends a nightly newsletter highlighting news events of the day, and providing a summary of new articles posted on the website. Econintersect will not sell or pass your email address to others per our privacy policy. You can cancel this subscription at any time by selecting the unsubscribing link in the footer of each email.

US Census says manufacturing new orders declined. Our analysis agrees. The data has been soft for a half a year. Consider that this data is noisy - and the rolling averages (which include transport) are decelerating - and are in contraction territory to boot. Unfilled orders are shrinking (year-over-year unadjusted). Most components soft.

As a comparison to the inflation adjusted new orders data, the manufacturing subindex of the Federal Reserves Industrial Production was growth accelerated 0.2% month-over-month, and up 6.0% year-over-year.

Seasonally Adjusted Manufacturing Value of New Orders - All (red line, left axis), All except Defense (green line, left axis), All with Unfilled Orders (orange line, left axis), and all except transport (blue line, right axis)

Now look at the manufacturing component of industrial production. While it is true that these are slightly different pulse points (inventory not accounted in shipments) - they should not have different trends for long periods of time.

A declining unfilled orders backlog could be a recessionary indication as unfilled orders generally decline in poor economic times. Keep the score on surveys, the following is a comparison of surveys to hard data - this Census data is the orange bars.

Comparing Surveys to Hard Data

/images/z survey1.png

Caveats on the Use of Manufacturing Sales

The data in this index continues to be revised up to 3 months following initial reporting. The revision usually is not significant enough to change the interpretation of each month's data in real time. Generally there are also annual revisions to this data series. The methodology used by US Census Bureau to seasonally adjust the data is not providing a realistic understanding of the month-to-month movements of the data. One reason is that US Census uses data over multiple years which includes the largest modern recession which likely distorts the analysis. Further, Econintersect believes there has been a fundamental shift in seasonality in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007 - the New Normal.Econintersect determines the month-over-month change by subtracting the current month's year-over-year change from the previous month's year-over-year change. This is the best of the bad options available to determine month-over-month trends - as the preferred methodology would be to use multi-year data (but the New Normal effects and the Great Depression distort historical data). This series is NOT inflation adjusted -Econintersect uses the PPI - subindex All Manufactured Goods. However, this is a rear view look at the economy. Manufacturing new orders or unfilled orders generally correlates to the economy - but it is not obvious in real time whether a recession is imminent. So in context to economy watchers - manufacturing by itself cannot be used as an economic gauge.

The growing use of ad blocking software is creating a shortfall in covering our fixed expenses. Please consider a donation to Econintersect to allow continuing output of quality and balanced financial and economic news and analysis.

Keep up with economic news using our dynamic economic newspapers with the largest international coverage on the internet